Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

Alma’s mother cleaned houses in the afternoons, then worked a night shift in an imaging lab at Miami Beach Community, so Alma and Felice usually had the place to themselves. One night around 2 a.m., the girls were sitting around drinking Diet Cokes, watching a dumb reality show about people starving on a tropical island. There was a bang on the window and Felice jumped; she turned to see Bethany’s grubby face pressed to the glass. She wished Alma would tell her to get lost. Instead Alma giggled. “Oh my God — Bethany is insane.” They went outside: Bethany was so stoned she swayed from side to side, rippling with laughter. “I gotta take a leak, you guys!” she brayed.

It was a late-summer night, the warm air was filled with bugs like ruby dots in the darkness. Felice wished she weren’t there. She never would have hung out with anyone like Bethany in school. Though sometimes the girl’s slanted smile, the forced, splintered quality of her laughter, reminded Felice of Hannah, and a wave of dizzying sickness and guilt rushed over her.

“Go for it!” Alma sat on one of the squat cement posts that lined the building’s front entrance. “We’re all outside in nature. That’s what animals do.” Alma propped herself with a straightened arm and her brown hair swayed in a curve down her back. When Felice first met Alma, she was working as a temp in several of the Miami Beach modeling agencies and she had all sorts of friends and “contacts.” But Felice gradually came to understand Alma was just desperate for people to like her.

“You think I won’t?” Bethany’s laughter made her look old, wrinkles cracking around her eyes. She plopped down on the patch of grass in hysterics, kicking her legs, panties around her knees, peeing on herself and into the grass. Like a baby. Alma told Felice that Bethany hadn’t even known what her period was — she’d come to her, shaking and tear-streaked, and Alma’d had to explain everything, show her how to use a tampon, give her aspirin. “She left blood all over the toilet seat,” Alma said, rolling her eyes. “My mom shit a total brick.”

That night, Bethany (now smelling of pee) wanted to go out and Alma immediately agreed. Felice wasn’t sure if she was even allowed in the apartment without Alma. Alma’s mother put up with having Felice underfoot, but she muttered about her daughter’s “user-loser friends.”

First they went to The Sinker, then to Gerk’s, places where they wouldn’t be carded. The bars seemed interchangeable to Felice: starchy triangles of light suspended over pool tables, jukeboxes, waves of rancid grease, nicotine, and old beer. The men leaning against the bar automatically looked the girls over. Their eyes lingered on Felice, then slipped to Bethany. At the second bar, a man with an oily gray ponytail reached for Bethany, pulling her close; Felice watched Bethany turn pliable and childlike, pressed against the side of the man’s gut, her hands resting on his half-buttoned guayabera. The man tongued his cigar from the front to the corner of his mouth. “Esta es mia!”

After he’d bought them rum and Cokes, the girls moved on to another bar Bethany knew about, closer to the beach. It was in the basement of an apartment building and the only marker was a little acid blue lightbulb above the door. Felice didn’t like the look of the place. Alma said, “So leave if you want to, you big wuss.”

This place was the worst one yet — its sour old reek mingled with something chemical, as if it were built on a toxic waste dump. The bar had a flinty light, like that of an office in a nightmare, and except for a few hazy forms at the bar, it was deserted. Even Alma mumbled, “Fuck, Bethany — the fuck kind of place is this?”

The bartender nodded, his white cap of hair dimly visible. He had some sort of tattoo that crept up his temple, extending halfway onto his forehead. Bethany went over to one of the men leaning against the back wall. A few minutes later, Felice, Alma, and Bethany sat at a table in the corner with a dusting of white powder on a ceramic plate like the ones in her mother’s kitchen. They weren’t even going to hide it. No one — not even the bartender — seemed to pay any attention. The man crouched over the powder, chopping it up with a butter knife and scraping it into lines on the plate. Felice thought they looked like mathematical symbols — equal signs and minuses — a coded warning. He handed Alma a rolled-up twenty. His name was Gary. He had one clear green eye, and one murky green one that lazed in the wrong direction. Felice didn’t like his fawning manner or the way he put his hand on Bethany’s head while she snorted, as if holding her underwater. Most of the kids Felice knew couldn’t afford real cocaine. Felice snorted less than half a line, gulped back the chemical drip from her sinuses. “I’m good.”

Gary smiled, his teeth big as chalk. “You don’t like my present? That’s not crack, you know — that’s the real shit. You think it’s full of baking soda and Ivory soap?” He turned to Alma and Bethany. “I don’t see any soap bubbles coming out of the princess’s nose? Do you see bubbles coming out of her nose?”

Gary watched as Alma and Bethany finished the powder. Bethany straightened up, shivering and sucking air through her teeth. She waved her hands. “Mmm!” Alma rubbed her nose fiercely with the flat of her hand. “Everybody happy?” Gary asked. The girls collected their bags as if they were leaving a restaurant, and trooped out of the bar into the soft night. Felice still tasted the acrid drip. She wasn’t sure if she had a buzz or if it was sheer relief that made the air seem so feathery. “Finally,” she blurted. “God — did you ever think we’d get away from that slime ball?”

Alma elbowed her and Felice realized that Gary had followed them out. He caught up to Bethany and put his hand on the nape of her neck. “What about my tip?” Felice grimaced at Alma, trying to stave off a beat of fear, but Alma’d had the most to drink: she rolled forward, unsteady on her feet; head swinging as if too heavy for her neck. After just a few blocks, Alma sat down on some cement stairs leading up to another apartment building and grabbed the edge of the step with both hands. Her head tipped forward. Felice sensed the weight increasing in the front of her own temples, as if she’d snorted lead dust. She waved to Bethany and said she’d have to help Alma get home. Bethany twisted around under the man’s hand, her eyes small and hard, before Gary jerked her forward.

Felice stood there watching Bethany stumble up the street beside the man. Alma was already passed out, her upper half slumped at the waist, so her face rested on her knees and her arms dangled to her ankles. Felice would’ve been content to curl up on that step beside Alma. They were on a quiet residential street, dead-ending at the lip of the beach: everyone was indoors, peacefully asleep. But Felice couldn’t stop seeing Bethany’s face — contracted, mottled crimson, as if fright could seize up under the skin. After a minute of dread and profound indecision, Felice started up the street after her. She went cursing Bethany under her breath, walking at first, then trotting. She spotted them at the opposite end of the block as she rounded the corner. They were hard to see in the dark; the man was pressing Bethany into a shadow against the side of a building, pinning her with his body. As Felice came closer, she saw Bethany’s head turned flat against the bricks. Uncertainty wobbled inside Felice: bat wings seemed to pulse in the air. One or two cars swished past. It was a wide public street but no one was out, the whole island weirdly deserted.

Barely two weeks earlier, she and Alma had been walking along Ocean Drive when a rumbling growl had stopped them. They craned back, shielding their eyes, watching a helicopter slide over their heads and out over the water. It stopped about half a mile out, hovering in place like a dragonfly. Squinting, Felice saw a rope or ladder flung from the side and dark forms — people! — being lifted, seemingly plucked directly from the sparkling waves. Tourists gathered on the sidewalk to watch, commenting on the scene. The silhouetted event, from that distance, seemed almost balletic. People around them started clapping, then someone made a comment about spearfishing for Haitians, and a few people laughed. Felice couldn’t move her eyes away: she saw sparkling shadows for an hour afterward.